English as a Second Language in Kindergarten--Testing Young Children. Preschool Education Series, No. 3. Indochinese Refugee Education Guides.

Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA.

This guide first points out the difficulty and the lack of reliability involved in using tests to evaluate the abilities of children from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Suggestions are then given for using existing evaluation techniques to test the English language proficiency of children at kindergarten level. The following are the main points emphasized: (1) keep tests short, (2) keep them simple, (3) keep them pleasant, (4) test in small groups, and (5) tape record all speech samples. Suggestions for testing the recognition of contrastive sounds, grammatical structures, and sound production in English conclude the guide. (TL)